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Comment by eumenides1 | Hacker News Reader

The point is that we should reconsider giving (temporary) monopolies to companies that are based public research.

I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.

Manufacturing takes time and money to develop. Revenue should pay for those costs. The non-profit gains experience, but no profit. The for-profit gains profit. If the for-profit decides to raise prices too high, there will be a willing and capable competitor waiting in the wings.

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This is completely incoherent. Consider a book author who has a monopoly on for profit publishing, but anyone else can publish for no profit.

The book author’s expected profits would plummet as it would be the wild west in production.

What you’re really saying is “we should pay massively less for vaccine development”. Which again, sounds nice, but....why would anyone have developed a vaccine? It’s a complex project which costs billions and has taken 12+ months while taking resources away from competing projects.

The public money is an incentive to get people to put those considerations aside and devote all their resources to vaccine development. This is a sensible public investment in a return to normalcy.

Exactly. The idea that the public funds research, but corporations can monopolies the results of that research for profit, is just disgusting. Non-exclusive deals are fine. Exclusive ones not, at least not within the country/countries that funded it; they already paid for it, and denying them access is basically theft.

Drug companies also fund their own research, to the tune of massive expenditures. What you’re suggesting would incentive these companies to disengage from partnerships involving public funding. Whoever pays for the research, each company’s goal is to profitably sell a non-generic treatment. If the only way they can do that is to eschew public funds, they will do this and the result will be less cooperation and a far reduced ability for the government to influence the direction of private sector research, and more importantly shape private sector manufacturing and the quantities of specific treatments supplied to the market.

Honestly, this is overblown. Most of the budget for these corporations goes to marketing, and the R&D mostly goes to repatenting efforts or incremental repurposings. They rarely come out with anything new, and if you look at recent years you may as well say that they never do.

You hit the nail right on the head. This is the same with basically every consumer product in capitalism, which is why it’s so inappropriate for life saving medicine.

Maybe I'm mistaken here, but one such case was Sofosbuvir and its pricing was indeed very controversial.

Rant. Prime time TV is now pharma pushing their drugs with the occasional programming jammed between the ads. All those ads are coming from their extreme markups. Placebo and manufacturing artifacts aside, a molecule is a molecule, buying generics should be the default. It is bad enough, but the real disgrace is pharma salespeople masquerading as GPs prescribing meds according to who is sponsoring them. Instead of telling people about the active ingredient they send them to buy BRAND. At least this is my experience in the 2nd world.

The FDA has made 42 new drug approvals in 2020: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/new-drugs-fda-cders-new-molecular-...

Certainly some of those are new uses for existing drugs, but drug trials ain't cheap either.

Most of the budget for these corporations goes to marketing

Often repeated, but the data doesn't bear it out, especially in aggregate.

https://www.raps.org/getattachment/5578195e-ed51-4f03-8adc-c...

The article that graph comes from indicates that is self-reported data from the companies which may not be consistent in what is considered R&D vs. marketing cost.

https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2019/7/...

> I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.

Not-for-profit manufacturing would have to be done by the government itself, wouldn't it? Otherwise, what other entity would and could actually pay to set that up?

Non-profit companies exist all over the US. Even non-profit drug manufacturing is done to some extent, but at a much smaller scale right now than we could have. The companies still charge money for services, the employees get paid, but the governance of the company is not focused solely on increasing profit margins. Most medical core science is done non-profit right now, at US universities. Many universities have on-premise small-scale manufacturing capabilities which serve their own needs, in medical labs but also others, like materials sciences and chemical science/engineering. There's no intrinsic reason why those couldn't be ramped up, or even pooled between physically close universities by creating a joint non-profit entity.

> The point is that we should reconsider giving (temporary) monopolies to companies that are based public research.

Now we can disagree on term length, but, a temporary monopoly to a company is what a patent is defined as and lasts 20 years.

Patents are one tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Publicly funded research is a different tool. Usually, patents are based on privately funded research.

the problem is for a competitor to emerge, they have to do a lot of work after X years.

My proposal is to have a company parallel develop processes so we can have competitor after expiry immediately. The competitor can't profit from it, but it can do work at 0 cost.

Society at large is being asked to make drastic adjustments because of a collective health issue.

Why is the corporate "right to make profit" sacrosanct when nothing else is?

This is a clear case of Eminent Domain. All mandated, mandatory, Covid-19 related products must be offered at cost, or even better, we should just nationalize drug companies. We're all in this together and companies need to adjust to "new normal" as well.

Totally agree. This is not the time for bean counters. We need to fix this and we need to do it now.

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